Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (
More info?)
> "REDWAGON" <REDWAGON@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:84357F27-2F58-4B3A-B922-DCCB8FD1C0C5@microsoft.com...
>>I Just purchased a new (retail) Western Digital 120GB HD. Existing HD is a
>>60 GB drive. The software that came with the new HD indicates an option to
>> transfer all of the system from the old drive to the new drive. I
>> understand all of the pin settings required when doing this transfer and
>> hooking up >> the cables correctly, no problem. My question is: When
>> using the software that WD has to do this transfer from the old drive to
>> the new one, does it transfer everything including the operating system
>> (XP Home) and all of my personal files ?
>> and after the transfer, is the old drive void of any of the old
>> operating system ?
"Lee Chapelle" <no@email.please> wrote in message
news:OEvP4EpiFHA.3288@TK2MSFTNGP09.phx.gbl...
> It would "clone" the old drive, byte-for-byte.
> No, it would still be on the old drive also. You could theoretically boot
> either one using the BIOS to change the boot sequence or else use a boot
> manager.
> Once you do the process you will likely have half (60gb) of the new drive
> unpartitioned, the software tutorial will guide you through partitioning
> and formatting this space for use using Windows Disk Management. You could
> also resize the partition using some software, but that probably not be
> the wisest course anyway.
>
> Lee
"Lil' Dave" <spamyourself@virus.net> adds...
> And I'm going to beat this to death.
> Copy using the WD program from bootable removable media. REMOVE the
> original hard drive. Install the new hard drive as the master.
> AFTER you've done this and booted off the new hard drive, you may
> reinstall
> the old hard drive as slave or whatever.
> Don't forget the pin configurations for WD include either a master/alone
> and
> master w/slave. Separate pinout options. Not the same things.
REDWAGON:
The information provided by Lee Chapelle is basically correct in that
whatever data is presently on your source disk (the old disk that you will
be cloning) will remain after the cloning operation. And, as he states, the
new drive will be an exact (for all practical purposes) duplicate of the old
one.
However, his comment re unpartitioned disk space on the destination drive
following the cloning operation needs to be modified. In cloning the
contents of your 60 GB drive to the 120 GB one, the WD program will allow
you to select an option that creates a partition on the destination drive
encompassing its full disk capacity. So unless you've selected an option to
manually resize the destination drive partitions, the 120 GB drive will
contain a single partition that includes its entire disk space. Thus,
(unless you choose otherwise) there will be *no* unallocated space on the
120 GB drive to partition/format following the cloning operation
Lil' Dave's suggestion that you immediately boot to the newly-cloned drive
AFTER disconnecting the old drive is a good one. For one thing, you
obviously want to ensure that the clone "took". And the major disk imaging
companies like Symantec & Acronis recommend this course of action. As a
matter of fact they recommend that only one bootable drive be connected
during normal operations because they see a potential for system files
corruption of one sort or another when two bootable drives are connected.
Frankly, (with a couple of minor exceptions) I've never run into a problem
along those lines but I generally work with two removable drives so that one
of them is ordinarily disconnected except during the cloning (disk imaging)
operation that we routinely use for backup purposes. But it *is* a good idea
that when you *first* boot to your new drive following the cloning
operation, you make sure your old drive has been disconnected.
You haven't said, but possibly you'll be using your old drive as a backup
drive. Now that you've had some experience with "cloning" a drive, you may
want to consider a disk imaging program such as Symantec's Norton Ghost or
Acronis True Image for routine cloning of your new working drive for backup
purposes. While in theory you could use the WD utility that you initially
used to clone the contents of the old drive to the new one, its cloning
speed is extremely (painfully!) slow and really not practical for routine
disk imaging for backup purposes.
Actually, for better security it would be best if the backup drive be a
USB/Firewire external hard drive, so you might want to consider installing
your old drive in a USB/Firewire EHD enclosure.
Anna